Liam Dalton

Matthew Yglesias: “…Trump has stated his intention to make Commerce Secretary (and billionaire investor) Wilbur Ross the lead authority on trade negotiations. The other is that he is tapping University of California economist Peter Navarro for a brand new White House job, heading up something Trump is calling the National Trade Council.”

“This makes sense, since Ross and Navarro were the co-authors of an important policy paper the Trump campaign put out during the election season that mostly focused on trade issues.”

“Unfortunately, the paper’s discussion of trade was incredibly shoddy. George Mason University’s Scott Sumner describes as ‘a complete mess,’ which, if anything, is too kind. When Adam Davidson profiled Navarro for the New Yorker, he wrote that even when he asked Navarro to help him out, he couldn’t find a single other economist who fully agreed with him on trade and China. Which is about what you would expect, since the Ross/Navarro trade policy analysis is based on a mistake that would get you flunked out of an AP economics class.”

“Perhaps the biggest monopolies we should be worried about are two Silicon Valley giants: Google and Facebook,” Jeff Spross writes for The Week.

“Jonathan Taplin recently took this issue on in The New York Times, and his numbers are astonishing. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has market shares in mobile search and operating systems that are two to three times as large as AT&T’s in its respective markets. Alphabet’s cash on hand dwarfs that of AT&T and Time Warner combined, and Alphabet’s level of debt is far lower. Both Alphabet and Facebook are among the top 10 largest companies in the world, and their respective market capitalizations outpace any AT&T-Time Warner combo by hundreds of billions. But most striking is this: ‘In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook.'”

“Google and Facebook are the new railroads. And producers of digital media are a bunch of turnip farmers hoping to ship their goods into town.”

Bloomberg Tech: “Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.”

“In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn’t make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she’ll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.”

Tom Jacobs: “Everyone who has ever turned to their friends Ben and Jerry for solace following a break-up is aware that painful emotions often lead to overeating. Yet when discussing the obesity epidemic among low-income families, policymakers tend to focus on more tangible factors, such as the cost and availability of healthy food.”

“Over the past few years, a number of researchers have begun pointing out this emotion blindness, suggesting the stress of poverty is an underappreciated underlying problem. Two new studies that confirm and refine this proposition have just been published.”

“So a more equal society, where most members feel respected and experience a sense of belonging, is a lower-stress society, and this reduces anxiety-based eating, which, in turn, combats obesity.”

Neil Irwin: “A new president won’t take office for another month, but the financial markets’ early verdict on the Donald J. Trump era is in, and it is straightforward.”

“They are saying the Trump administration will be good for corporate profits, and hence the stock market is way up. (The Standard & Poor’s 500 is up 6 percent since Election Day). It will also mean higher interest rates and inflation over time. (The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds has risen to 2.6 percent from 1.85 percent in the same span.)”

“But the result of those two shifts should make anyone thinking of investing in the stock market nervous. You’d be counting on the profit-boosting elements of the Trump agenda being enacted and the profit-hampering possibilities not materializing. Another way to think about it: Putting money into the stock market right now means accepting less compensation for taking on risk than was available before Election Day.”

Quartz: “Many of Trump’s promises appear implausible. But we don’t have to rely on guesswork or partisan punditry to evaluate his progress; we’ve got reliable data to gauge Trump’s success.”

“The charts below provide an at-a-glance dashboard for measuring the economy under president Trump. We have collected 10 indicators that reflect his main campaign promises, with data from the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to provide context. We’ll update the data as Trump puts his plans into action.”

“Certain large sectors of the economy are suffering from something like reverse-innovation: Costs are increasing much faster than any incremental improvement in quality. In Gallup’s new report with the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, I argue this is happening in healthcare, housing and education,” Jonathan Rothwell writes for Gallup.

“Take healthcare. From 1980 to 2015, healthcare expanded from 9% of the national GDP to 18%. Some of this is natural and good. The aging population requires more healthcare, and even modest economic growth has freed up spending power for healthcare. The problem is that the per-unit costs of healthcare — actual procedures, visits with doctors, pharmaceuticals — have all soared. So the question must be asked: Has it been worth it? I conclude not.”

“One reason for the decline in Americans’ self-reported health status is the extraordinary inefficiency of the U.S. healthcare system.”

Washington Post: “Following the election, an artist and urban planner named Neil Freeman created a fascinating tool he dubbed ‘Random States of America.’ The map randomly generated state boundaries and showed which candidate would win based on the population of those new areas.”

“At the request of Josh Wallaert, senior editor of Places Journal, Freeman then built on the idea to create a new series of five U.S. maps, organized around different systems than our currents states and districts. Part land-use planning and part science fiction, these fascinating maps show how reworkings of U.S. cartography would have resulted in different election outcomes.”

Austin Frakt: “How would you find the best deal on an M.R.I. or a knee replacement? No idea, right? This lack of price transparency in health care has been cited as one of the reasons we spend too much on it. It’s easy to overpay. Health care prices vary tremendously. And there is no established relationship with quality.”

Noah Berlatsky: “The idea of taking guns away from police is likely to receive a highly skeptical response, even from people concerned about the problem of excessive force. In a nation with so many millions of guns on it streets—both legally and illegally–asking police officers to give up their own weapons presents a logistical and practical quandary.”

“Yet there is some evidence that disarming the police might be less dangerous that it sounds. According to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of the 27 law enforcement officers murdered in 2013 in the line of duty, only 6 were able to fire their weapons at assailants. Another two were killed after their firearms were stolen and used against them. (Note: several dozen other officers died while on duty during this time, the majority from car accidents.) In many cases, it seems arming officers isn’t a black and white issue of officer safety. Especially since the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report reports that 461 people were shot and killed by police in 2013.”

“Policing in the US needs to change. But even if mass disarmament is a political and legal impossibility right now, there are other options. As a first step toward changing law enforcement philosophy, Smithsimon that suggests police departments consider disarming officers when they are not working. Studies have shown that much police misconduct occurs while police are off duty. There are plenty of incidents in which off-duty police recklessly fire weapons, sometimes with deadly consequences.”

“The problem with intelligence briefings is not so much that they cause boredom in the recipient as that they routinely induce terror,” John Mueller writes in a CNN Op-Ed.

“Central to the briefing is the ‘threat matrix,’ a compendium assembled by the CIA and the FBI that includes all the ‘threats’ — or more accurately ‘leads’ — needing to be followed up. Garrett Graff reports that it is ‘filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information’ and that it can come off as ‘a catalogue of horrors’ and as the ‘daily looming prognoses of Armageddon.’ Philip Mudd notes the ‘voluminous and dominating’ threat information, much of which he points out is raw and ‘below threshold’ for top leaders, and notes that it contributes ‘to a pervasive sense that every day might bring a new attack.'”

“Part of the problem emerges from what Marc Sageman, after years of experience in the intelligence community, calls ‘a bias for alarming interpretations.’ Often, he says, ‘the worst interpretation’ is given full attention while potentially disconfirming evidence ‘is neglected.’ Robert Jervis agrees: probing for ‘alternative explanations of what was happening’ is, he finds, ‘very rare.'”

Quartz: “As interest rates creep up, home prices soar, and affordable housing dwindles, housing experts say next year could be a tipping point for renters outpacing home owners in the US.”

“The Federal Reserve’s quarter-point interest rate hike this week, to 0.75%, is widely expected to be followed by more rate increases next year, which will put upward pressure on mortgage rates.”

“And while president-elect Trump has bemoaned the notion of rising rates, his policy proposals on immigration, and his pick of Ben Carson for head of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, a critic of affordable housing policies, aren’t likely to help the cause of American homeowners, either… The president-elect’s impending crackdown on immigration has the potential to push home prices even higher, by reducing the supply of affordable housing. Housing inventory has been declining for five quarters in a row, and is down 3.4% this year.”

Washington Post: “The nation shed manufacturing jobs at a steady pace over most of the last quarter century. A combination of trade deals, automation and economic recessions sent the number of manufacturing jobs plummeting, with 6 million jobs being lost by 2011.”

“But since then, about half a million jobs have been regained.”

“They’re not the same jobs that left. They’re not coming back everywhere, or even in the same places where jobs were lost. The map of where products are made in this country is being redrawn.”

Rob Cox: “Sure, Taiwan gained a flicker of national pride from Trump’s shout-out. For Tsai, it may have helped shore up her sagging popularity for a moment. But it’s hard to see how this $500 billion-plus economy will benefit from its brief dalliance with America’s Tweeter-in-chief.”

“Taiwan deserves better. The island is a model for the region – and its far larger rival 110 miles across the water. And though its economy has slowed in recent years, its people enjoy an enviable quality of life. Its GDP per capita on a purchasing power parity basis is some $47,000, higher even than in the United Kingdom, France or Canada. It’s an example of what’s possible when democracy and free markets flourish in Asia… Though it was not perfect, the One China status quo allowed Taiwan to manage its business and security while Beijing could pretend it didn’t matter.”

“But the longer-term negative effects of the call will become apparent in coming months. China can further restrict tourism. It can pry away some of the few remaining countries that still formally recognize Taiwan, such as Panama. As Moody’s recently warned, it can also exert pressure on other nations in the region to restrict trade or commerce with Taipei. Most painful, and not without a cost to its own interests, China can hit Taiwanese capital on the mainland.”